


Penny's Lawn Chair Quest

by AmbiguousPenny



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eliot and Quentin were married at the mosaic, Eliot uses his cane, Eliot’s Post- Monster Recovery, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Memory Loss from Old Age, Multi, Penny and Eliot have a quest, Penny has a lawn chair, Penny has a magic flask, The lawn chair is comedic relief, season 4 fix it, the mosaic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24583825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmbiguousPenny/pseuds/AmbiguousPenny
Summary: Quentin and Eliot remember their lives at the mosaic very differently. After sitting back and watching his friends suffer Penny takes it upon himself to fix things.In which Penny packs a lawn chair and a magic flask and takes Eliot Waugh on a quest to recover lost memories.
Relationships: Arielle/Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn- Mention, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi & Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi & Quentin Coldwater
Comments: 20
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TakenByEmrys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TakenByEmrys/gifts).



> Hello! This is something I've been working on for a while, I have a few chapters already finished! I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Notes: There is some mention of suicidal ideation/suicide attempt in this chapter relating to the events of the season 4 finale, but no character death.

They practically fall out of the mirror realm, they’d been moving so fast. Quentin can hear Alice screaming at him, but he can’t actually feel anything. There is a brief and terrifying moment in which he is worried that his shade has been left behind in the mirror realm. But then he can feel the familiar ache build up in his chest, the one that has been swelling slowly in the last several months, hollowing him out. 

They are in the lab at Brakebills once again. Alice is still screaming. “You idiot, you stupid, reckless, idiot you could have died!” 

It’s Penny who finally tells her to stop, or he thought she had stopped but suddenly she was just gone. Penny was crouched in front of him, hands gripping his shoulders and shaking him. 

“Alice. Where is Alice?” he asks. It sounds more like a general curiosity as the words fall from his mouth. His voice monotone and tired. So tired.

“I took her home.” 

“Why-” he doesn’t get the opportunity to finish questioning the situation before he is smacked across the face. “What the fuck?” He jolts backwards, cups his jaw in his left hand, skin hot with the sting of Penny’s slap. As much as the assault against him had actually really fucking hurt, suddenly he is functioning with a bit more clarity. 

“Quentin, what the hell happened back there?” Quentin flinches at the way Penny’s voice catches in his throat. The traveler was clearly concerned, his eyes searching Quentin’s. Quentin knows he must have done something especially fucked up to spark concern in Penny, of all people. 

“I don’t know. It was so fast. I really don’t remember.” he knows it’s not the response the traveler wants but it’s honest. Penny almost seems to accept it. 

“You stopped running.” Penny says after a moment. Quentin wants, almost desperately to be surprised by this. But he’s just not. He doesn’t really know what to say. He nods once and lets out a shuddering breath. 

“Oh.” That ache he’s grown comfortable with stirs in his chest, bubbles up and catches in his throat. All at once the memory begins to bleed out. He remembers Alice screaming after he’d ordered Penny to take her, remembers casting, mending, throwing the bottles into the Seam. He remembers his magic splintering, the lights were almost beautiful, like lightning bugs or stars. He remembers hesitating, distracted by the pure beauty of magic, distracted by his own exhaustion. Everything grinding to a halt. For just a second, he’d let himself think about letting go. He was so tired, he’d watched Everett disintegrate in front of him and for a fraction of a second imagined what it would be like to let himself be disintegrated too. Eliot had been saved, he was safe, his friends were safe, maybe he could just be done. He is so drained, hollow, rubbed raw from the grief of loving someone as deeply as this. Eliot would be okay, but nothing else would change. Eliot still wouldn’t want him. After everything was finally over he would still be alone, the love of his life still out of reach. For a second he let himself believe it would be easier to just fade into the beauty of his own magic. But then-

“Run you stupid motherfucker!?!?” Penny broke through to him, snapping him into focus and Quentin ran. He doesn’t stop running until they are spilling out onto the floor back at Brakebills. 

“I stopped.” Quentin says when he realizes that he hasn’t said anything and that Penny is just staring at him. “I didn’t mean to.” He chooses to ignore how much that feels like a lie when it comes out of his mouth and hopes that Penny will too. 

“You know that your wards have been totally fucked lately right?” Quentin winces, so Penny would not be accepting his feeble claims at definitely not being anything near suicidal. He doesn’t know what to say to that so he just looks anywhere but at Penny. In the process he realizes that they are still spilt out on the floor of the Brakebills lab. 

“Penny, can we not talk about this here? I’m tired. I want to go home.” His voice is still flat. Penny shakes his head but he reaches out a hand to place against Q’s shoulder and all at once they are somewhere else. Though he isn’t anywhere that he’d anticipated being. The air is filled with opium and there is grass underneath his hands where there had been hardwood before. They both stand up, Quentin shakes out his legs as he gathers himself, taking in his surroundings. He is more than a little confused with why Penny would bring him to Fillory, he just wanted to be home, in his own bed, at the penthouse. Maybe with the door locked and the lights out for the foreseeable future. When he gathers his senses and looks around it feels like being punched in the stomach. 

Before him is the run down and ramshackle cottage, with a door that looks as though at one time it had been painted blue. There is a large square shaped pit surrounded by tiles that have been sun bleached and are now colorless. There is a daybed and garden overgrown with weeds. He wants to laugh. Penny brought him  _ home _ . He also wants to scream. How dare Penny bring him  _ here _ ? How did Penny know to bring him here? 

“How did you know about this? Why did you bring me here?” His voice betrays him as it shakes, heartbreak in his throat and on his tongue. Penny only offers him a tight lipped smile and a shake of his head. 

“You’ve been dreaming about this place. I don’t know what it is, but your wards have been shit and you dream about this shack every fucking night.” Of course Q knows about the dreams, but the words feel like sandpaper against a truth that has already been rubbed completely raw. “Eliot is going to be okay, and the Monster and his sister are gone. The crisis has been averted. So now we are going to talk about this. You’re going to tell me everything. I’m not watching you try to kill yourself again.” 

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” He retorts, defiant. Penny gives him one tight nod. Quentin knows when to accept defeat and he accepts it exhaling sharply. “Lets just go inside first.” 

Penny follows Quentin past where the mosaic had once been and toward the cottage, he raises an eyebrow at the way Quentin seems to know exactly how to shake the doorknob to push open the old creaking front door. He is even more curious at the way he disappears into a back room and reemerges with a second chair and a dusty bottle of wine. “How long has that been here?” He asks without really wanting to know the answer. 

“Just like, 85 years give or take. Teddy sent it for one of our wedding anniversaries, but I guess we never got around to drinking it.” He explains as though it wasn’t some serious feat of insane time magic. As though he wasn’t actually surprised himself to have found it.

Penny watches him, bewildered as he finds two glasses tucked away in the single cupboard of the tiny cottage kitchen. His gaze follows Quentin as he washes the glasses in the sink, moving about the kitchen with an air of belonging there. Finally, Quentin sits in the chair that he pulled from the back and gestures for Penny to sit in the other before uncorking the bottle with a quick tut and pouring them two generous glasses. 

Quentin leans back in his seat, taking a long sip from his wine. Penny sniffs at his own glass, not exactly trusting its age. 

“So I guess I’ll start at the beginning then.” Penny nods at him, leans back in his chair and against his better judgement takes a sip of the wine. He’s surprised when it tastes pretty fucking good. “It was during the Quest of The Seven Keys, Eliot and I, we shared a leg of the quest that turned out to be remarkably complicated.” 

The bottle of wine only takes them through half of the story but Quentin tells Penny everything. He tells him about the mosaic, about that first year. He tells him about their wedding, three years in and two years after their first night together. Quentin’s heart swells as he remembers falling in love with Eliot all over again. He’d forgotten how to differentiate the aches in his chest, between the one that was love and the one that was heartbreak. He tells Penny about Arielle, their smart, funny, beautiful girl. How they’d invited her into their bed, and how she became a part of their home, their family. 

“When she got pregnant, it was Eliot’s idea for me to marry her, and it worked great for us because Fillory’s polyamorous marriage laws hadn’t been made strictly for royalty yet.” Quentin watched as Penny’s face betrayed him, displaying a concerning amount of mental gymnastics. 

“So you had a kid?” Penny finally clarified. “As a result of semi-regular threesomes with this hot redhead?” Quentin couldn’t decide whether or not the shock in his voice had stemmed from his fathering a child or his capacity to secure not one, but two sexual partners. Consequently he couldn’t decide whether or not to be offended. He gave Penny a small nod, knitting his eyebrows together. 

“Niiice. Cheers to you my dude.” And Quentin shakes his head, smirking as Penny clanked their empty glasses together. 

Quentin begins to wish that he’d saved the wine when he starts to tell Penny how suddenly Arielle had become very sick. It feels altogether impossible to keep going when he remembers having to tell Teddy that his mother had died. When he’s finished describing how much Eliot had done for them, how strongly he had held their family together after they’d lost her, he needs to take a break. 

“There used to be a village super close to here. Let’s go see if we can buy more wine.” He doesn’t wait for Penny to answer before he’s walking out the front door, across the clearing and onto the familiar footpath that worked its way toward the village. He’s not at all surprised that Penny follows him, and he tells the traveler about the village and its people and the festivals that happened there. He recalls the night of his and Arielle’s wedding, in the village square under the moonlight, how Eliot tied their hands and kissed each of them when their vows were done. Arielle’s belly had been sweet and swollen with Teddy and they had all been so happy. 

“Eliot was the love of my life, but I truly deeply loved her.” It was the first time he’d actually said it out loud to someone here in this timeline. The sincerity with which he means both of those statements catches him off guard, emotion stuck in his throat, watery with the feelings he’s had tucked away for so much longer than he’d realized. Penny pretends not to notice the waver in his voice and Quentin is grateful. 

They find the village. And more wine. And Quentin tells Penny more about their lives at the mosaic, about Teddy growing up and about their grandchildren. And then he tells him about when Eliot stopped remembering, little things at first and then bigger, but never him. Penny doesn’t say anything when he cries as he relives turning around to find his husband sitting in his chair gone to him forever. 

“I buried him.”

“Q, I’m sorry man.” Penny doesn’t know what else to say as he reaches out, squeezes his shoulder once. For a moment he mourns the loss of Eliot, wine drunk and sad for Quentin. He’s sad for the Quentin in front of him, but he’s more sad for the Quentin who had to bury his life partner, old and alone. He pours them each another glass as the sadness settles in the air around them. 

“But then I found the piece that solved the mosaic. A singular golden tile. It had been right under the surface like it had been waiting for one of us to die, just for the other to find it.” He remembers feeling betrayed, lied to and tricked. But he supposed the beauty of all life could have been easily argued to be a life well lived. And hadn’t they done that after all? 

Penny is already somewhat familiar with the rest of this part of the story, a young Jane Chatwin coming along to find that the mosaic had already been solved, the old man giving her the key that would allow her to fuck with the timelines. It takes a second to wrap his alcohol addled brain around the idea that Quentin had been that old man. That the key quest in this timeline is the only reason the other 39 timelines could exist. He is decidedly too drunk to ponder the linear and simultaneous existence of timelines 1 and 40 so he chooses to categorize it as a problem for a different day as Quentin recounts Margo’s role in effectively stopping any of it from even happening. This revelation leads him to re-categorize it as simply not his problem. 

“Damn. It sounds like you guys had kind of a sweet deal here.” Penny says to Quentin as he takes everything in. It’s late now, a chill evening air has settled over them who are delightfully warm from the wine. The wine is probably why Quentin doesn’t appear to Penny to be entirely as broken as he had been when they’d arrived. 

They are both heavy and sleepy from the day. Quentin’s throat is sore from talking so much and they decide to call it a night. Quentin decides he’d like to sleep on the daybed outside and leaves Penny inside, saying goodnight as he tucks out the front door with a pile of old quilts he’s rummaged out of the back. Penny sinks into the straw mattress for exactly thirty seconds before his brain arrives at the state of awareness in which he remembers that Quentin and Eliot spent 50 years fucking on this mattress and that has him up on his feet so fast he thinks that maybe he traveled out of the bed. After searching helplessly for a better solution in the front room he peeks his head into the back room that Quentin had been pulling things from. There he finds a smaller single bed that he assumes had belonged to Teddy. He also assumes this makes it a safe surface for him to sleep. It’s a great deal smaller than the front bed but at least it’s not the former sex nest of Quentin and Quentin’s lovers.  _ Lovers _ , plural. The novelty of Quentin Coldwater having enough game to catch two lovers at once will probably never fade.

Penny settles for folding himself up on the smaller mattress and falls into a restful slumber. 


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there!! 
> 
> There are some content notes at the end! This chapter gets a little angsty.

Quentin’s dreams have always been impossibly loud. Louder when he and Penny were sleeping anywhere near each other, like when they had been roommates in the Brakebills dorms or now that they’d been living at the penthouse together with everyone else. Tonight his dreams are like surround sound and because they had spent all day at the mosaic cottage, talking about Quentin’s life here, it takes Penny longer than usual to establish that these dreams were not his own. 

_ Penny is standing in the little clearing cut out for the cottage and the mosaic. Even dreaming he thinks that he can feel the familiar sensation of opium in the air. There are children running and playing around, tucking in and out of the wood in a game of tag. Even over their laughter he can hear the voices of two men speaking in hushed tones, one of them standing, the other crouched, sorting clay tiles of various colors into neat piles next the pit made for the mosaic.  _

_ “He doesn’t remember me dad.” Says a choked voice. Penny hadn’t noticed before that the man standing is notably younger than the one working with the tiles, and there is a pang of empathy in his chest. _

_“I_ _know. I know and I’m so sorry, bear.” He immediately recognizes this voice as Quentin’s, a much older version of Quentin, who has stopped his task to look up at the younger man. Penny assumes now that this younger man must be Teddy, Quentin and Eliot’s son. He wonders for a moment if the children running about are in fact grandchildren._

_ “I keep thinking, that it can’t get worse and then it does.” Old Quentin’s voice wavers with the trembling of his lower lip. Teddy lowers himself to his knees next to his father and Penny fights his instinct to look the other way as Teddy leans into Quentin and begins to cry. There is something undeniably gut wrenching about watching a grown man cry into his father’s shoulder and Penny is overwhelmed by it.  _

_ Suddenly another voice calls through the clearing. Penny recognizes it immediately as Eliot’s.  _

_ “Hello! Hello there! Have you seen my friend? His name is Quentin, we came here together and I can’t find him.” Penny is startled when he turns around to find that Eliot is much younger than either of the other men. This Eliot is no older than he was during the key quest, probably the age at which he and Quentin had found themselves at the mosaic. His eyes are frantic and looks lost, desperate to find his friend.  _

_ Quentin stands with a bit of a struggle. Teddy follows him up with a pair of steady guiding hands and then the two of them are standing as Eliot approaches them.  _

_ “Have you seen him? My friend? His name is Quentin.” Eliot asks again, more urgently this time.  _

_ “Eliot,” Quentin starts, his voice soothing, his hands reached out as if to accept Eliot into them. “Eliot, my love, it’s me. It’s Q, it’s Quentin. I’m right here.”  _

_ “No, my friend, I’m looking for my friend.”  _

_ “I’m here. I’m right here. Please Eliot.”  _

_ “His name is Quentin.”  _

_ “Please. Eliot. Eliot, it’s me, it’s me.”  _

“Eliot!” Quentin calls out into the empty night, waking Penny, subsequently kicking him out of his dream. Penny wonders how often Quentin has had this particular nightmare. He is almost surprised he hadn’t seen some variation of it during their time in the penthouse when sharing a dream with Quentin was almost inevitable. Penny had seen many dreams of what he now knew as the mosaic, but he’d never seen this one, Eliot afraid and lost, Quentin desperate. 

Penny lays still in his bed, holding his breath as he listens for Quentin to make another noise. It’s still dark outside and when he doesn’t hear anything else he closes his eyes again. Drifting off to sleep, Penny doesn’t have any more dreams, and he isn’t pulled into any more of Quentin’s. In the morning, when Penny eventually catches a good look at Quentin and can see the dark circles blossoming beneath his eyes, he’s pretty sure that Quentin never actually went back to sleep. 

Penny wakes up to the smell of coffee. Which is something akin to a miracle after the night of sleep he can barely claim to have gotten. Quentin doesn’t say anything when he comes out of the back room, he doesn’t mention Penny’s decision not to sleep on the bigger bed, only nods hello and pours him a cup of coffee from what appears to be some kind of Fillorian Cemex and shoves it into his hands. This is when Penny notices the lack of sleep written all over Quentin’s face. He almost feels guilty for it. He had thought that bringing his friend here, to talk about what had been fucking him up so badly in the last several months would be a step in making him feel better. As they stand together silently, drinking coffee in this impossibly tiny kitchen, exhaustion clear on Q’s face, Penny worries he might have only made a step in making things worse. 

They might also just be hungover.

“How old is this coffee?” Penny asks, breaking the silence. Something like relief bubbles up in his chest when Quentin throws his head back in a laugh. It occurs to him that he hadn’t heard his friend’s laugh in a very long time and he can’t help but laugh too. 

“It’s not old! I went into the village this morning. I got food too.” Quentin says with a touch of a smirk, nodding toward the kitchen table where there was a bowl now filled with fruit, and a loaf of fresh bread beside it.

“Oh thank god.” Quentin laughs again as Penny crosses the room faster than he thought possible, and he’s a fucking Traveler, he can get places pretty fucking fast. 

After food and more coffee Penny sits outside on the edge of the daybed as Quentin starts to gather stacks of sun faded tiles, hands moving mindlessly. Penny watches him as his mouth opens and closes, like he’s trying to figure out what to say next. 

“It didn’t ever get that bad.” He says finally and Penny is definitely confused. 

“What didn’t?” Penny quirks an eyebrow. 

“I saw you, last night, in my dream.” Quentin answers matter of factly. 

“Oh! Right. Yeah.” Penny nods at him, remembering the dream, remembering the fear in Old Quentin’s voice as he tried helplessly to convince Eliot to recognize him. 

“I haven’t had that dream since actually being here, in that timeline. I used to have it a lot, towards the end. I was so afraid that he’d forget us. He never did. He forgot some of the big stuff, not really that it happened, but when. Right before he died,” he exhaled, hands paused on their task. “He forgot our wedding, right before he died, he couldn’t remember our wedding. He could remember my wedding to Arielle, but not ours. That’s the worst it got. I wanted to show him where we had it, but I just, I never got to.” When he’s finished he finds that he’s started crying. They don’t talk for a while after that. Penny watches as Quentin stacks and unstacks the tiles, and begins to wonder if this action is simply one of habit. 

It’s well into the morning when Penny finally asks him “So, what happened when you got back? Why weren’t you two, I don’t know, together?” Quentin lets out a huff. Penny knows immediately that he’s struck a chord and that it’s a deep one. Quentin looks down at his hands where they lay in his lap, dusty from dirt and old chalk. Like he is trying to worry a hole into it, he chews on his bottom lip. The root of everything lies in the answer to this question and Penny almost regrets asking it as he watches heartbreak paint itself across Quentin’s expression.

“Well, technically Margo stopped it from happening.” He says first.

“I mean yeah, but you clearly remembered it all.” Penny retorts, because obviously they had remembered it. “And everything is still here, and Jane Chatwin got the key when  _ you _ solved the mosaic, it clearly still happened.” 

“Yeah. We came to Fillory shortly after Margo came and stopped it, to deal with her crazy child wedding shit she had going on.” Penny raises an eyebrow at that last statement, but shakes his head. That was clearly a different story for a different day. “When we walked into the throne room it smelt like peaches and plums and there was a letter that I had written to Margo, right before I died, it was how she’d known everything to stop it from happening. And like, it triggered all of these memories at once. These beautiful memories. And then I was looking at Eliot, and he was my husband, alive and young again and I felt every ounce of love for him that I’d felt in those 50 years.” Quentin says, voice cracking around the last part of his sentence. Penny’s heart ached for his friend. “I asked him to give it a shot, because we worked, I said ‘who gets that kind of proof of concept?’ I thought I was being sarcastic. I thought I was making some silly joke because we were married, of course we’d be together. And then he just... shut me down.” Tears came streaming down Quentin’s face then. Penny moved close enough to let his friend sob against him as he recounted what sounded a lot like having his heart ripped from his chest. Penny was livid. 

“What do you mean he  _ shut you down _ ?” As far as Penny was concerned, the second Eliot Waugh was up and walking around again he could expect a brutal ass kicking. 

“He said that it wasn’t us. That I wasn’t-” Another broken sob. “That with a choice, we wouldn’t choose each other.” 

  
Fuck ‘ _ up and walking around’  _ Penny thought, pissed. Suddenly Penny was gone, leaving Quentin alone at the mosaic in a single blip. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter starts the dive into some stuff with memory loss, this story pretty much revolves around Eliot suffering from memory loss as he ages. So if that’s something that is sensitive for you, please take care of yourself! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading :)


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, this is the last chapter I have finished! More to come soon!

Penny doesn’t exactly consider what would be waiting for him when he arrives at the hospital seconds later. In the hospital waiting room is an angry swarm of his friends, demanding explanations. “Where is Quentin? What happened? Why did you leave? What are you doing here? What happened to Quentin, why isn’t he here?” Most of which had come from Alice, who had been absolutely hysterical when Penny had traveled her back to the penthouse and left her there. It didn’t seem unrealistic to think that maybe she’d never stopped screaming. Julia was also furious. Which, okay, reasonable. Kady just wanted to know what the fuck was going on. 

Margo looked exhausted and tear stained. “Just tell us that Q is okay you asshole.” She said over everyone else’s frantic questions, everyone stopped talking at once.

“He’s fine, he’s okay.” The tension and urgency seemed to dissolve, Margo sat down, satisfied with that answer or perhaps too tired to want for much more. This answer seemed to also satisfy Kady. Alice and Julia however were still glaring at him like they’d have his throat if given the chance. 

“Where is he?” Alice said, punchy and determined, eyebrows knit together with a ferocity he’d never grown accustomed to seeing on this Alice, when his Alice had carried a far more gentle temperament. 

“He’s in Fillory. He’s fine.” While Penny was relatively confident that Quentin was alive and well where he’d left him at the Mosaic, he wasn’t sure how truthful it was to say that Q was  _ fine. _ He was struck with a brief note of guilt upon remembering the particular state his friend had been in when he’d traveled here. “He’s in Fillory.” He repeats, hopeful that nobody will pick up on his amendment. 

“He’s in  _ Fillory _ ?” Alice says, incredulous and maybe a solid thirty seconds away from piercing Penny’s soul with her eyes. 

“He needed air, and a break from this whole situation and honestly maybe a little bit of opium.” Alice and Julia each took a step back as he continued. “I don’t know if you noticed, but he was barely holding on this entire time, Q hasn’t caught a single god damn break and all we did was fight him on his decisions at every turn. He almost didn’t make it out of the mirror realm. He almost let himself be disintegrated because we haven’t had his back. He just put his life on the line, again, for us and for magic and for the whole fucking universe, so yeah, I took him to Fillory, because he needs a fucking break. And I need to talk to Eliot.” 

Alice and Julia didn’t have anything to say after that, opening their mouth and closing them again almost in sync. Kady and Margo both stood from their seats. Kady guided Alice and Julia away from the situation, Penny could hear them murmuring but Margo was approaching him and he tuned it out. 

“Why do you need to talk to Eliot?” She asks, monotone and very likely sleep deprived. “He’s awake. You didn’t actually even ask if he was awake. If he lived.” She says, like she wants to be offended for him but doesn’t have any energy left to be. And Penny doesn’t blame her. He realizes his mistake, realizes that he can’t just come in guns blazing. The heat of anger starts to subside. 

“I just need to talk to him. I won’t yell. I promise.” 

When she leaves him alone in Eliot’s room, Eliot looks weary and frail and maybe a little more drugged out on pain medication than Penny had planned for. And Penny yells a little bit, if only to get through to him. 

“Why did you turn Quentin down?” 

“What?”

“Peaches and fucking Plums or whatever? When you two remembered that timeline, why the fuck did you say no?” Penny watches as Eliot registers what he’s referring to, and he’s taken aback by the grimace on his face. He’s not sure if it’s physical pain or the topic at hand that has his mouth twisting. 

“Probably because I was in love with him, and I couldn’t live another life of just being a friend he sometimes slept with until another pretty girl came around.” 

Eliot’s words came out brazen and venomous and Penny takes a step back, shocked. After everything he’d learned in the last twenty-four hours, this was an answer that didn't seem to fit. He’d half expected some bullshit about running away from feelings that were too big. It wouldn’t have shocked him to find out Eliot Waugh had some commitment issues. 

“I’m sorry, what the fuck? How do you remember that 50 years?” Penny asks him, his arms crossed and shaking his head. Eliot looked at him quizzically. Maybe it wasn’t fair to have this conversation while he was on so much morphine. But Eliot managed to tell him anyway.

He tells Penny everything he remembers of the life that he shared with Quentin at the mosaic and it lacks everything good about it that Quentin had shared with him just the day before. In Eliot’s version the two of them had started hooking up after that first year, and had continued until they’d met Arielle. He remembers Teddy, remembers being like a second father to him. He remembers Arielle’s death, remembers supporting Q and raising their son. He remembers most of it. He remembers loving Quentin. He doesn’t remember their wedding, doesn’t remember their mutual relationship with Arielle. The most heartbreaking is that he doesn’t remember being loved by Quentin. Penny is awestruck and sad for Quentin and for Eliot. He thinks of the beautiful life that Q had painted so vividly and remembered so fondly. 

Eliot’s eyes shone with unshed tears as he spoke and Penny almost felt like shit. Clearly this was something that hurt Eliot, to remember a life shared and to remember it being one full of unrequited love. So he can’t blame Eliot for what he did, for saying no to what he thought he’d be subjecting himself to, but it doesn’t mean he’s off the hook by a long shot.

Listening to Eliot’s side of what  _ had _ been a really good story on Quentin’s end, Penny can’t help but be completely floored by the utter lack of communication between these two idiots. He was stunned that they had not consulted with each other on something as massively important as a lifetime spent together. As Eliot finished Penny stared at him, slack jawed and awestruck; at a complete loss for words. They really hadn’t talked to each other? 

“So yeah. I said no. And I guess maybe I regret it because maybe none of this would have happened if I’d opened up a little bit more but I was just trying to save myself the heartache. I just didn’t remember it being something worth getting hurt over trying again.” Eliot says after the silence has filled the room to capacity and something dawns on Penny. He feels downright stupid when suddenly he remembers his dream from the night before, or rather Quentin’s dream. He remembers their morning conversation about how Eliot had begun to lose his memories just shortly before he died. Suddenly, Penny thinks that maybe he’s a bit of an idiot too.

Penny just stares at Eliot, who is staring back at him, eyes wet and his mouth closed in a thin line. 

He knows immediately that he needs to fix this. 

Or more so that somebody needs to fix this and it might as well be him because he’s already knee deep in it. As much as he’d deny it, Quentin had become one of his closest friends and Quentin loves Eliot and Eliot loves Quentin and he can’t just not fix it. 

But he sure as fuck isn’t going to make it easy. 

“Right. Well, I’ll see you later, I should probably let you rest and shit.” Eliot doesn’t say anything else as Penny exits the room. He tries to organize the mess of everything as he walks down the hallways of the hospital. When he finds his way back to the waiting room his four friends are still there, sitting together in a quad of chairs, radiating far less rage than he’d been met with when he arrived. 

Margo and Julia sit in the two chairs that are facing in the direction he’s coming from and as he approaches Margo lifts her head up to look at him. She raises a brow as he gets closer. 

“Did you yell?” She asks. 

“Only a little.” 

“He probably deserves it.” Penny lets out a little bit of a chuckle and her mouth splits into what is almost a smile considering the situation. He looks over the group, Julia is tucked up into her chair, chewing on her thumbnail, Kady is holding onto Alice’s hand. Everyone looks like they could use a shower and bed to sleep in. 

“I think he’s going to be okay. His spirits are good.” He says it because that’s what people say when their friends who were previously on the brink of death look like they’re going to make a full recovery after all. Eliot’s spirits were definitely not good. “I’m going back to Fillory. You guys should probably go eat something, shower, sleep, smoke some weed maybe.” His heart skips a beat when he catches Julia smirk underneath her hand. She still wasn’t looking at him though. 

Alice clears her throat to speak and Penny prepares for something sharp but is met with a piece of paper being handed to him. 

“Can you just give him this.” Penny looks down at the folded piece of paper, it's addressed to Q from Alice. He shoves it in his back pocket. 

“Yeah, yeah I can do that.” He looks to Margo one last time. She meets his eyes. 

“Let me know when he’s in good enough condition for a quest.” He doesn’t wait for a response before he’s gone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you!! 
> 
> Also thank you for the comments I am literally the worst at responding them I am deeeeeply sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you!


End file.
